Gokliz was married to a daughter of Cochise, a Chiricahua Apache chief who fought white settlement in Arizona throughout the 1860s, carrying out raids and clashing with the U.S. Army. Cochise died in 1874, after the Chiricahua Apaches had begun living on a reservation; later that decade, after the group was moved to a different reservation site in the desert, many rebelled and went to live in the mountains, resuming raids on settlements.

Gokliz's work eschews much representation of life in captivity in favor of remembered and imagined episodes of community life. His drawings depict hunts, meetings, and ceremonies, using perspective in interesting ways to show motion and conflict.